University of Colorado Boulder (CU) students, engineers and scientists are partnering with Boulder, Colorado-based Black Swift Technologies to use UAS to measure water moisture at a research and demonstration farm called the Irrigation Research Foundation (IRF) in Yuma, Colorado.

With the help of a NASA Small Business Innovative Research Grant, Black Swift Technologies was launched out of CU Boulder in 2011 by aerospace PhD graduates Jack Elston, Maciej Stachura and Cory Dixon, and the company developed the UAS that will fly over the test farm, the SuperSwift UAS, which is fixed-wing and has a removable nose cone.

The SuperSwift UAS will have high-tech sensors mounted on it, which were developed by a team led by CU Boulder Professor Al Gaseiwski of electrical, computer and energy engineering.

According to Professor Brian Argrow of the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences, the sensors will “assess moisture in crop fields at a resolution of about 50 feet across and to a depth of about 8 inches.”

“For us, this project is all about the sensor,” Dixon says.

“We want to explore soil moisture mapping for things like land use, landslides and water runoff. While some farmers don’t have the ability to adequately assess their soil moisture, we can fly over an entire crop field with high enough resolution to give them data that will eventually allow for more efficient water use in particular areas.”

High-precision drone observations of soil moisture will be combined with measurements from NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite, which was launched in 2015.

SMAP’s primary radar instrument failed, but scientists are still able to use a “passive radiometer instrument on board SMAP to produce surface maps,” with each pixel representing an area approximately 25 miles across, says Argrow.

The IRF facility in Yuma also has sensors embedded in the soil to chart moisture. Those findings will be compared with data collected overhead by the SuperSwift UAS.

Each flight team will consist of an on-the-ground pilot, a staff member and two students.

The testing, which will take place in the coming weeks, will be a part of “Project Drought,” which is a CU Boulder initiative to use UAS to “improve the understanding and prediction of drought, flooding and agricultural vulnerabilities.”

As a collaboration of the school’s Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) and the Center for Environmental Technology (CET), Project Drought is a research effort initiated under CU Boulder’s Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing (IRISS) project.

IRISS is a “pillar” of the school’s Grand Challenge initiative efforts, which seek to “harness science, technology and innovation to solve key national or global problems.”

“The IRISS objective is to fill the gap between the ground and space with sensors and services,” Argrow says.

Argrow, who also directs the IRISS project, adds, “we see Project Drought as a way to succeed in high-precision, high-resolution mapping, ultimately increasing the efficiency of water management.”